(#5989) Child informational development and the Internet

      When I was a child I had the knowledge that my family members could share with me, my teachers and classmates at school, and the library where we first had to discern the Dewey Decimal System. Even then asking the big why questions had no immediate answers. In other words I was only able to search out answers that were less than complex. Most of the time I was told not to question some things as unimportant to my daily life. What I know today is that I should have been told that those were good questions and that although they didn't know the answers they would help me find a way to answer them.
     When people say that progress is slow this is a prime example of that. Life is hard and being all things to a child can be challenging to the nth degree especially a child like I was. However, the challenge has been lessened in this current time as technology has come about in a way that circumvents most all the obstacles to learning. One such major technological advance is the Internet. If the Internet had been around when I was first starting out in school I would have had many answers to questions instead of disappointments and the many times I was told to stop asking questions. Because the Internet would have been my backstop when my usual routes to questioning were stymied.
     When we are young is when our minds are most able to capture and retain information. Having an Internet option expands the depth of the young mind and allows it to immediately progress at rates that often enough took me decades to achieve. History should should show how progress in our individual informational gathering record on whole has leaped ahead through Internet data bases that are constantly evolving and growing. To be young with an Internet connection is a dream for me that I can imagine if it were me. We need to teach our children that there are no unsolvable problems just ones we haven't figured out yet. We figure them out through information at our fingertips.